Real Tone w/ Lizzo

Via Aerialist, I worked with GUT Miami as cultural strategy lead for Google Pixel's Super Bowl LVI debut — a campaign built around Real Tone, the Pixel 6 camera technology engineered to accurately represent people of color in images. The strategic challenge: turn a product feature into a cultural statement about who gets to be seen.

The answer was “Lizzo in Real Tone #SeenOnPixel.” The 60-second spot opened with poorly shot images of people across a range of skin tones while narrators described a lifetime of being failed by camera technology — then resolved into portraits captured on Pixel, scored by Lizzo's then-unreleased “If You Love Me.” The work reframed decades of image inequity as a solvable design problem, and positioned Google as the brand solving it.

The response was immediate. The spot drove an 86% increase in searches for the Google Pixel 6, a 400% increase in Google Store traffic, was ranked the number one Super Bowl spot by Newsweek, and earned coverage across more than 1,000 publications. At Cannes, Mobile jury president Hugo Veiga called it “probably the easiest Grand Prix to give,” noting its real-world impact and the fact that the technology was built with data from the community it was designed to serve.